Lobotomy: When Destroying Your Brain Was "Cutting-Edge Medicine"

In 1949, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for inventing the lobotomy - a procedure that deliberately destroyed parts of the brain to "cure" mental illness. Within a decade, it became one of medicine's greatest scandals. Over 40,000 Americans had their brains scrambled, many left as incapacitated zombies, and the procedure's most enthusiastic promoter performed operations in his traveling "lobotomobile" van at county fairs and asylums.

American physician Walter Freeman turned lobotomy into an assembly-line procedure. He invented the "transorbital lobotomy" - hammering an ice pick through the eye socket into the brain, then wiggling it around to sever connections in the frontal lobe. No surgical traini ...